Lower Columbia River Fishery Development Program

In its November
1948 report on dam operations and future plans, the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers outlined a $20 million plan to build fish ladders, irrigation screens
and fish hatcheries and to improve spawning and rearing habitat for
salmon and steelhead, all focused on the on the lower Columbia River. The
impacts of dams on salmon and steelhead that spawned in the upper
Columbia River Basin would be addressed by “developing the salmon runs in the
lower tributaries to the highest level of productivity,” according to the
report.

This
was the beginning of the Lower Columbia River Fishery Development Program,
which would focus on producing fish in lower-basin hatcheries — downstream of
Grand Coulee Dam — to compensate for losses in the upriver runs. The
1948 report committed the Corps to “conserve salmon and other migratory fish to
the maximum practicable extent,” provide “minimum interference” with fish and
wildlife habitat and use “the best possible means” of salmon and steelhead
passage at the dams.

This
was an important development in the history of salmon and steelhead
conservation efforts in the Columbia River Basin because it enabled closer
cooperation between state and federal fish and wildlife agencies and allowed
federal money to flow to the states for specific conservation work, something
that had not been possible previously.

The
program had six parts, including improvements to spawning and rearing habitat
for fish and the creation of salmon sanctuaries in all Columbia River
tributaries below McNary Dam. The sanctuaries never were created — sanctuaries
in Oregon effectively were killed by the state Legislature; Washington’s
sanctuary bill was overturned by the state supreme court. The hatchery part of
the program quickly became the most important part. Fully half of the budget
for the program went to hatcheries in the 1950s, nearly 80 percent by the
1980s. Clearly, the preferred means of dealing with the impacts of dams on
upriver salmon was to mass-produce them in the lower river — below the dams.

Fisheries
scientist Jim Lichatowich writes in his 1999 book Salmon Without Rivers, A
History of the Pacific Salmon Crisis, that the government’s plan to
transfer upriver stocks to lower-river hatcheries “. . .treated salmon
management on the Columbia as a large agricultural enterprise, a massive
extension of the earlier attempts to ‘till the waters’ for the benefit of
humans.”

Federal
funding for hatcheries in the lower Columbia program, provided through the
Mitchell Act, continues to this day although the federal hatcheries,
like others in the Columbia basin, steadily are undergoing a paradigm shift in
management away from mass-production to production techniques that use hatcheries
in conjunction with habitat improvements to rebuild naturally spawning fish
runs.